When Silence Powers Sound

Jacky Terrasson Trio at Jazz Standard

For maybe a third of his late set on Thursday night at the Jazz Standard, Jacky Terrasson played piano at the volume of a windup music box, or left fat stripes of silence as the other members of his trio played on steadily.

This was extreme-dynamics brinkmanship, figuring out how music can intensify while growing ever quieter. The game descends directly from Ahmad Jamal; the song Mr. Terrasson used it on most was “But Not for Me,” a tune Mr. Jamal radically personalized in 1958. But that song appeared almost as a surprise, after Mr. Terrasson rummaged through parts of other standards, moving among them without breaks.

Photo

Jacky Terrasson Trio Mr. Terrasson performing with his band at the Jazz Standard on Thursday night.Credit
Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

The form of the whole set, not just the individual songs within it, felt elastic; very little was finished or codified. There were short breaks for applause — this was music that challenges and rewards an audience in regular rotation — but Mr. Terrasson mostly played through them, pushing down single notes like sketch ideas, seeing what might grow out of various combinations.

Generally he seemed loose, at liberty. He’s got a new record, “Gouache,” which has just been released by Universal France. (Forty-five now — he’s been a significant figure in jazz for nearly 20 years, though sometimes an elusive one, with irregular career moves — Mr. Terrasson grew up in France and lives in New York.) But it won’t be available here till next year, and the set wasn’t based on it.

Instead it was based on the possibilities inherent in his current band, which can be heard on that record. The trio includes the bassist Burniss Earl Travis, whose notes come in elegant, subtle shapes, groove with no ostentation; and the drummer Justin Faulkner, who played aggressively, with an extra snare and a will to dominate. Sometimes Mr. Terrasson encouraged that. And sometimes he defused it with playfulness and acts of redirection — a new melody or a change in tempo after a long vamp. (Maybe another third of the set was just vamps: thickening, fragmenting, then turning into something else.)

It’s a great band; it feeds itself. So a long version of “America the Beautiful” began as unaccompanied piano through a shuffle of styles, then added bass and drums for a reggae section, and slipped into swing with speed and volume. It looped through New Orleans rhythm, which Mr. Faulkner took apart after about 30 seconds, played with “I Got Rhythm,” and then returned to the theme, making a vamping cycle of chords out of the song’s closing line. But he left out one: that for “sea,” its final word.